VIA has announced an Eden ULV processor with a power envelope of only one watt. Amazingly, the chip consumes one tenth of a watt at idle. Don't expect much in the way of performance, though. The Eden CPU isn't known for its horsepower, and this particular model runs at just 500MHz-one third the clock speed of the fastest Eden VIA sells.

The new Eden ULV is Vida's third ULV processor and complements the existing 1.5 GHz and 1.0 GHz version with a 500 MHz variant. What makes this new version special is that it is rated at a maximum power consumption of just 1 watt (0.1 watt idle power), which is significantly below the previously released models, which consume 3.5 watt (1.0 GHz) and 7.5 watt (1.5 GHz).

As all other currently available Eden processors, which also include regular version clocked from 400 MHz (2.5 watt) to 1.2 GHz (7 watt), the new chip is built using the 90 nm "Esther" core with 128 KB L2 cache and a 400 MHz front side bus. Via said that it will aim the CPU at ultra-mobile devices in personal and business computing segments as well as industry applications.

Could be very cool to have multiple lightweight CPUs in something like a PDA. Could do wonders for multitasking responsiveness if each program executed had a dedicated CPU. Still gonna be slow, but I bet switching tasks would be mighty snappy.